Abstract

In the Affective Health project we explore possibilities of how to, through biofeedback support users in making sense of the relationship between their stress and their behavior in everyday life. Affective Health is a tool for visualizing patterns and trends of bodily and contextual information. It is particularly important that the design reflects changes over time as this is how people start recognizing patterns in their own behavior and connect it to their bodily reactions. We spent substantial effort sketching and testing ways of portraying time that would move us away from more mathematically inspired representations such as for example graphs and calendars. Instead, we want users to see the signals our bodies emit as part of themselves, of their own ways of being in the world, alive, acting and reacting to their environment.
We have explored many possible, alternative ways of visualizing temporal representations through biofeedback. For example as the relation between different places and with time as different layers of history in a concept inspired from ecology. The latest and most developed concept is a cyclic repetition of biodata mapped on a spiral shape.